Tracking employees on social networks

Are your company's employees trashing the brand on Facebook and Twitter? Until now, it might have taken a small army to keep up with what workers were writing on social networking sites, but vendors are coming up with ways to make it easier. 

Messaging company Teneros this week showed off its "Social Sentry" service, which monitors employees' social networking activity. The company is pitching it as a way to prevent employees from disclosing secret or damaging information. The software-as-a-service offering alerts you when an employee uses keywords that have to do with your company's products or financial reports. 

Social Sentry might be considered extremely Big Brother-like, except that it only tracks public activity on social networks, including LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube, as well as Facebook and Twitter. If a user's privacy settings are limited to friends on Facebook, for example, the program doesn't examine the communications. 

Teneros unveiled the tracking tool at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley. In an interview with NetworkWorld, conference chief Matt Marshall said the social network monitoring might seem "kind of spooky," but it's something that can be done manually anyway.

"It's fair. It's almost, like, not too creepy. It's kind of doing what they could do otherwise in a non-automated fashion," Marshall told NetworkWorld.

For more:
- see the Teneros press release (PDF)
- read the article at NetworkWorld

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